Why Heat Is a Hidden Workplace Safety Risk

[Embed YouTube: YouTube URL]

Heat safety risk is not just a discomfort issue, it is a measurable drain on productivity, safety and staff retention. Heat related productivity losses are estimated at over a trillion dollars globally, and current workplace responses like water breaks and ice packs are not enough to solve it. The shift needed is the same one that applies to slip prevention: change the environment and the conditions, rather than expecting people to simply cope better.

The reader’s reality

If you manage sites where people work outdoors or in unconditioned spaces, heat has probably always been treated as a discomfort issue. Drink more water. Take more breaks. Push through. That approach worked, to a point, when extreme heat was occasional rather than routine.

This episode of the podcast features Anna Albright, founder of Klima, a company building wearable cooling technology for industrial workers. Anna’s journey into heat safety started with a delayed flight, and it led her to a conclusion that will sound familiar to anyone working in slip prevention: some safety problems cannot be solved by asking people to behave better. They need the environment itself to change.

That reframe matters beyond heat. Whether the risk sits in a warehouse, a construction site, or a kitchen floor, the same question applies. Is the person expected to manage the risk through effort and willpower alone, or has the environment actually been made safe in the first place.

The moment heat safety risk became visible

Anna’s realisation began on a tarmac in Houston, waiting for a delayed flight. Her first assumption was that the aircraft’s electronics couldn’t handle the heat. The real cause was simpler and, in her words, more revealing. As she put it, “it was the workers. The workers were too hot to safely work on the tarmac, and so the entire system had to shut down.”

That single incident reframed how she saw the problem. If heat could ground flights across an industry as tightly run as aviation, she reasoned, the impact on construction, energy, warehousing and manufacturing had to be far larger, and far less visible.

Just how large is heat safety risk?

The numbers Anna shared put real weight behind the problem. On a hot day, organisations typically lose 30 to 40 percent of production, and the losses aren’t only from breaks. Work simply gets slower and lower in quality once temperatures rise. Research cited in the conversation points to a roughly linear relationship: productivity drops by around 2 percent for every degree Celsius above standard room temperature.

In the United States alone, heat related lost hours are estimated to cost 150 billion dollars a year, excluding the knock on cost of delayed projects. Globally, citing figures from the International Labour Organization and The Lancet, Anna put the total closer to 1.09 trillion dollars. These numbers describe disrupted hours only, not the wider cost of incidents, absence or attrition that heat also drives.

Why current solutions fall short

Most existing heat responses were designed around the same assumption, that the person needs to adapt rather than the environment. Anna pointed out that the market’s default answers, ice vests, evaporative cooling towels and hydration breaks, all share the same weakness. Ice melts within an hour and leaves workers carrying something heavier and less comfortable than nothing at all. Evaporative towels stop working once humidity rises. None of them hold up across a genuinely hot shift.

Klima’s approach uses battery powered thermoelectric cooling rather than ice, aiming to keep workers cooler for longer without the melt and downtime problems of older solutions. Whatever the specific technology, the underlying point stands. Water and willpower can only take a worker so far once conditions cross a certain threshold.

It is worth noting the same pattern shows up in most safety categories once you look closely. A control that looks reasonable on paper, a sign, a schedule, a product marketed as protective, can still fail in practice if nobody has actually tested whether it holds up under real conditions. Heat safety and slip prevention share that same blind spot.

The same shift slip prevention has already made

This is where the conversation lines up closely with how we think about slip prevention. For years, heat safety has been treated as a behavioural issue, workers not drinking enough, not resting enough, not listening enough. Anna challenged that framing directly: “we’ve been blaming people essentially for getting too hot, which is crazy.”

Christian made the parallel explicit during the conversation, noting that in slip prevention, the instinct is often to tell people to take more care, rather than asking whether the environment itself can be made safer. The same logic applies to heat. Behaviour can help at the margins, but it cannot substitute for genuinely reducing the risk at its source. This is the same principle behind why we test and improve floors rather than relying on cleaning and warning signs alone, and why organisations that measure and address risk directly, rather than assuming behaviour will cover the gap, typically see incident reductions of 57 percent or more.

Reframing safety as a revenue driver, not a cost

One of the more practical points from the conversation was about how safety investment gets approved in the first place. Anna argued that safety is too often treated as a cost centre, when it is directly connected to output, retention and operational performance. As she put it, “safety is very interconnected with operations and revenue, right? Because it’s ensuring that people can perform.”

For anyone trying to secure budget for safety improvements, whether that’s cooling technology, floor testing, or anything else, this reframing matters. A case built on productivity, retention and measurable return tends to land better with finance decision makers than one built on compliance alone.

Anna also made a point about timing. Attention on a safety issue tends to peak right after something has gone wrong, and that is precisely when a budget request is most likely to succeed. It is a pragmatic observation rather than a comfortable one, but it reflects how safety investment decisions actually get made inside most organisations.

Pull quotes

“It was the workers. The workers were too hot to safely work on the tarmac, and so the entire system had to shut down.” Anna Albright

“We’ve been blaming people essentially for getting too hot, which is crazy.” Anna Albright

“I talk a lot about how environment dictates performance.” Christian Harris

Show notes

Episode summary: Christian Harris speaks with Anna Albright, founder of Klima, about why heat is one of the most underestimated risks facing physical workers today. Anna explains how a delayed flight in Houston led her to leave a career in investment banking and consulting to build wearable cooling technology, and the conversation covers the scale of heat’s cost to productivity, why existing solutions like ice vests fall short, and why heat safety needs the same environment first thinking already applied to slip prevention.

Guest bio: Anna Albright is the founder of Klima, a company building wearable cooling technology for industrial workers, and sits on a committee for the International Safety Equipment Association helping shape heat safety regulation.

Key moments:

Links and resources mentioned:

Take the next step

If heat, cleaning routines, or any other overlooked factor could be quietly driving risk across your sites, the Slip Risk Scorecard is a helpful way to find out where to look first.

Internal link suggestions